Saturday, June 06, 2015

Things We Think About What Happened At FIFA

In light of the arrests that have rocked FIFA and the even more shocking resignation of newly re-elected FIFA President Sepp "Baron Harkonnen" Blatter, it's time to take a measured look at what it all really means. To wit:

BWAHAHHAHAHHAHAHAHHAHHAAH. I mean, somewhere, John Oliver just wet himself laughing.

The floodgates have started to open. There are going so many ex-FIFA officials rolling over on Blatter that this thing's going to look like a ball pit going over a cliff.

The surprising thing is not that FIFA officials were arrested; the surprising thing is that they're only being arrested on charges of bribery going back 24 years. There are probably unopened bags of cash sitting underneath Blatter's desk that are older than that.

Something tells me that United Passions, the FIFA-sponsored cinematic rub-and-tug to FIFA, is going to become the next Rocky Horror Picture Show. A chance to participate, even tangentially, in FIFA's slow-motion train wreck is just going to be too good to pass up. Especially if the movie is as awful as you'd expect a movie made by an international criminal cartel about itself to be.

As yet another round of scandal has rocked UNC here locally, it is instructive to consider the sheer scale of the problems at UNC (fake classes, etc.) versus the ones at FIFA (billions of dollars of bribes). One suspects that if he had billions to play with, Larry Fedora might actually build himself a defensive secondary.

I'm sorry, but "Sepp Blatter" still sounds like the name of the villain from a third-tier Bond movie. You know, one of the Roger Moore ones from the seventies where the plot was just an excuse for Q to give Bond a nose hair trimmer that was also a personal helicopter and the bad guy had a female sidekick named Crude Innuendo.

They may move the 2022 World Cup out of Qatar at this point, as one of the easiest ways to demonstrate that your organization has belatedly developed morals is to stop doing business with the soccer federation that's getting stadium workers killed at a terrifying pace. On the other hand, there is slightly less than zero chance that they pull the 2018 Cup from Russia, if for no other reason that even the surviving FIFA commissioners aren't particularly eager to deal with the repercussions of making Vladimir Putin look bad on the world stage.

Regardless of what happens with the organization's senior leadership, England's still going to choke in the next World Cup.